“The prop that doth sustain my house”: Jewish Women, Widowers, and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

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Date:
August 17 2021
Length:
44min 59s
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3
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896
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Series: Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought

Machshava:
Women 
Parsha:
Vayeitzei 

Collections: Twice Blest: Exploring Shakespeare and the Hebrew Bible

Description

Few literary characters have loomed as large and felt as "real" as Shakespeare’s Shylock. Though, as early 20th-century British Jewish historian Cecil Roth reminds us, he is a "sheer figment of Shakespeare’s imagination." Or was he? In this episode, Dr. Chaya Sima Koenigsberg illuminates Shakespeare’s (in)famous portrait of Shylock with her research on medieval Ashkenaz Jewry and the lives of the Rokeach and his wife, Dulce. She also sheds new light on the presence of Hebrew bible figures Jacob and Leah and the underexamined presence of prayer in the play.

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    Learning on the Marcos and Adina Katz YUTorah site is sponsored today by Sigal Gottlieb and Lenny Moise in honor of the wedding of Temima Tova and Yedidya Moise and by Henry Silberman to mark the yahrtzeit of Julia Silberman, Yura Sheva bas Chaim Yosef Silberman and by Reuben Pludwinski in memory of his mother Itta bas Yehudah Leib a"h